Posts Tagged ‘Ron Hunt’

As I was ranking Mets players with Presidential surnames, I noticed a few of them only had one year tenures with the team. This got me to wondering which one-year Mets were the most productive, and I was back on the Baseball Reference Play Index before I knew it. The results are listed below (as with the President list, I’m relying exclusively on the version of WAR (rWAR) used by Baseball Reference).

One note before we start: I omitted the best “one-year Met” from my list. Ike Davis had a 2.5 rWAR in his rookie year, which easily tops all of the other contenders. Seeing as how he’ll be the starting first baseman this season, I figured he didn’t technically qualify. If he suffers a career-ending injury before the season starts feel free to blame me for jinxing him. Now, on to the list:

10. Derek Bell (1.3 rWAR, 2000): A throw-in in the Mike Hampton deal (at least, that’s how I always looked at it); Bell was the starting right fielder for most of the 2000 season (a season ending injury late in the year prevented him from playing in the postseason). He slashed .266/.348/.425 in 624 plate appearances over 144 games. He added 18 home runs and 69 RBI, but his 98 OPS+ indicates that he was slightly below average for a right fielder.

My favorite Derek Bell memory has nothing to do with his time on the Mets. He signed a two-year deal with the Pirates after the 2000 to be their starting right fielder. When informed that he would have to compete for his starting job, Bell launched his infamous “Operation Shutdown”. From the Wikipedia:

“Nobody told me I was in competition. If there is competition, somebody better let me know. If there is competition, they better eliminate me out of the race and go ahead and do what they’re going to do with me. I ain’t never hit in spring training and I never will. If it ain’t settled with me out there, then they can trade me. I ain’t going out there to hurt myself in spring training battling for a job. If it is [a competition], then I’m going into ‘Operation Shutdown.’ Tell them exactly what I said. I haven’t competed for a job since 1991.”

That’s one of the best sports quotes I’ve ever heard, trailing only Latrell Sprewell’s “I got my family to feed” and Rasheed Wallace’s epic “As long as somebody CTC, at the end of the day I’m with them. For all you that don’t know what CTC means, that’s ‘Cut the Check.” If I ever re-name this blog, Cut The Check is the hands-down favorite to be the new name.

9. Richie Ashburn (1.3 rWAR, 1962): While technically tied with Bell, I couldn’t bring myself to equate a Hall of Famer with “Operation Shutdown”. After all, Ashburn played his final season with the inaugural 1962 Mets, which was inglorious enough. He slashed .306/.424/.393 and had a 122 OPS+, an incredible line for a 35 year-old. In fact, Whitey’s .424 OBP stood as the team record (minimum 400 at-bats, an entirely arbitrary threshold) until John Olerud topped it.

8. Rick Cerrone (1.4 rWAR, 1991): Even though I remember Cerrone on the Mets in 1991, I have always thought of him as a Yankee. That’s why I was surprised to learn that he played for six other teams (Cleveland, Toronto, Atlanta, Milwaukee, Boston, and Montreal). Another interesting factoid is that 1991 was the second most valuable season of his career (in terms of rWAR, at least), trailing only his 1980 season (3.9 rWAR for the Yankees).

6. & 7. Joe Foy and Duke Snider (1.4 rWAR, 1970 & 1963): We touched on Foy during the Presidential post, but I’ll say it again: just an unnecessary trade. Duke Snider’s story was similar to Ashburn’s in that he was a past-his-prime future Hall of Famer still hanging around. Unlike Ashburn, Snider had a connection to the Mets as one of the brightest stars of one of the franchises they were meant to replace, the Brooklyn Dodgers. Snider didn’t play much center for the Mets, appearing in only 11 games there in 1963, but while his bat was not up to his previous standards he did have an above-average OPS+ (115). He would finish his career in 1964 with the San Francisco, making him one of only four men to play for the Giants, Dodgers, and Mets. The other three are listed at the bottom of the post.

5. Dick Schofield (1.8 rWAR, 1992): Jayson Werth’s uncle was acquired from the then-California Angels along with a PTBNL (Julian Vasquez) for Julio Valera. Schofield was a defense-first shortstop with an excellent arm, but he was a pretty poor hitter. That’s being nice actually. According to the Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Schofield Schofield shares the record (with Mark Belanger) for most seasons with more than 400 at-bats and less than 100 hits with four. This seems like a bad thing, but it isn’t really. They are arbitrary thresholds, and some good players (including Mark McGwire, Ricky Henderson, and Barry Bonds, to pick just three) appear on the list. For the record, 12 other players had similar seasons with the Mets, including Dave Kingman, Todd Hundley, and Tommie Agee.

4. Desi Relaford (2.1 rWAR, 2001): Relaford falls into the nebulous category of “players I liked for no particular reason”. The Mets picked up on waivers from the San Diego Padres and paid him just $475,000, then later packaged him with the also-awesome Tsuyoshi Shinjo for Shawn Estes. 2001 was a career year for Relaford (he didn’t come close to replicating that season again) so Steve Phillips was right to try to sell high. Being Steve Phillips, however, he completely botched the transaction.

3. Eddie Bressoud (2.2 rWAR, 1966): I didn’t really know that much about Bressoud, who played all four infield positions (but primarily shortstop) for the 1966 Mets. Turns out he was very productive (at least in terms of Mets from that era): his single season with the Mets produced the third highest rWAR among position players to that point in the franchise’s history (behind Ron Hunt’s 2.6 and Ken Boyer’s 3.0). According to Baseball-Reference.com, he’s fairly similar (as a player, not necessarily as a person) to Tony Bernazard. I wonder how many times he challenged minor leaguers to a fight?

1. & 2. Tommy Davis and Richie Hebner (2.3 rWAR, 1967 and 1979): A Brooklyn native, Davis had an 18 year career for 10 teams. He actually lead all Mets position players in rWAR in 1967, admittedly not the most impressive achievement ever. A former MVP candidate (his 6.8 rWAR in 1963 trailed only Willie Mays and Frank Robinson that season), Davis was acquired along with Derrell Griffith in a trade for Ron Hunt and Jim Hickman. 1967 would be a last hurrah of sorts for Davis: he would never again be that productive, and he would play for 8 more teams over the next nine years. Unlike with Relaford, however, the Mets successfully sold high on Davis: packaged with three other players, he brought back Tommie Agee and Al Weis in a 1967 trade with the White Sox.

Richie Hebner also had an 18 year career, though he was much less traveled (he only played for five clubs). Hebner was known for digging graves during the offseason, but more importantly the Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richie_Hebner notes that “Few people know that Rich Hebner has 3 heros: Jerry Flynn, his son Joe Hebner, and his nephew Michael Hebner.” I felt I had to do my part to spread that important piece of information, so there you go.

Hebner came and went before my Mets fandom began and nothing jumped off of his Baseball-Reference page, so I originally didn’t have anything else to add. That is, until I read his page over at the Ultimate Mets Database. Holy crap did this guy elicit a lot of raw emotion from Mets fans, and they are all over the map. I had no idea so many felt so strongly about a guy who was only here for one year. Bonus: someone defended him by calling him a “gamer”.

As we head into a week sure to be filled with exciting general manager interviews (I’m in the Sandy Alderson camp), I figured I’d use Baseball Reference’s Play Index to look at how some of the Mets’ seasons stacked up historically. I don’t know if I’ll make this a recurring series but I’ll probably come back to it during the long offseason. My first subject: Ike Davis.

Over at Amazin’ Avenue, Chris McShane (in this post) and James Kannengeiser (in his 2010 Postmortem: First Base) both looked at Ike Davis’ first season. Both are good reads and gave me inspiration for this post, which is an attempt to place Davis’ year in a larger historical context. I used the Play Index to look at the rookie seasons of every position player from 1901 to 2010 who qualified for the batting title, a list of 469 player-seasons. As you’ll see it’s a somewhat arbitrary comparison, but here we go:

The first take-away is the near-total absence of Mets: no Daryl Strawberry, no Jose Reyes, no David Wright. In fact, the only other Met rookie to qualify for a batting title was second baseman Ron Hunt, in 1963. In and of itself, it’s a trivial point: the other Mets rookies were either called up later in the season (like the three listed above), suffered injuries at some point in their rookie year (Reyes qualifies here, too), or weren’t good enough to earn enough at-bats to qualify. Nothing significant, just good trivia.

Sorting by Baseball Reference’s version of WAR, Davis checks in at 109 with a 2.5 BR WAR*, tying him with George Burns (1914), Jim Finigan (1954), Orlando Cepeda (1958), Chuck (not Curt) Schilling (1961), Ellis Burks (1987), and Austin Jackson (2010). For what it’s worth (which is not all that much), Davis had the fourth highest OPS+ of that group, trailing Cepeda (125), Finigan (120), and Burns (119).

Age strikes me as a relevant factor. There were 66 players on our list who were 23 on June 30th of their rookie season: only 15 had a better BR WAR than Davis’ 2.5 (Schilling and Jackson were also 23). Among them were Hall of Famers Paul Waner (5.7), Johnny Mize (4.9), Phil Rizzuto (4.3) and Joe Gordon (3.5), and future Hall of Famer Jeff Bagwell (4.7). Only 11 rookies had a higher OPS+: Mize (161), Waner (147), Alvin Davis (147), Bagwell (139), Harry Lumley (136), Babe Herman (136), Grady Hatton (128), Bob Meusel (126), Joe Hauser (121), Moose McCormick (118), and Hall of Famer (and revered Mets broadcaster) Ralph Kiner (117). By these (arbitrary) measuring sticks Ike Davis had the best rookie season since Bagwell debuted in 1991. For what it’s worth.

James Kannengeiser calls Ike’s 12% walk rate encouraging, and he’s right: only 32 players had a higher ratio of walks to plate appearances in their first season (Davis’ raw total of 72 walks is 30th among rookies qualifying for the batting title). On the flip side, Ike’s 138 strike-outs tied him with former American League Rookie of the Year Eric Hinske for fifth worst overall. Only Pete Incaviglia (185), Jackson (170), George Scott (152), and Jake Wood (141) had more strike-outs. You take the good with the bad, I guess.

I’ll be the first to admit it: I cherry-picked the stats discussed in this post. It’s meant to provide a historical context for Ike Davis’ rookie season and not to make a case for him to win Rookie of the Year (Jason Heyward tops Davis in many of the categories listed above and Buster Posey didn’t have enough at-bats to qualify for the batting title). Here’s the list: go to town on it and please let me know what you find.

My argument here is that in a lost season, Ike Davis’ performance was a legitimate bright spot. In some categories, his limited sample size of a career compares favorably to players who wound up in the Hall of Fame. By no means am I suggesting that Davis will join them. I am, however, suggesting that we can be encouraged by his rookie season and look forward to him being an important part of the 2011 line-up.